Storytelling in Multilingual Interaction

A Conversation Analysis Perspective

Jean Wong, Hansun Zhang Waring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367139216
• eBook ISBN: 9780429639494
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Integral to the tapestry of social interaction, storytelling is the focus of interest for scholars from a diverse range of academic disciplines. This volume combines the study of conversation analysis (CA) with storytelling in multilingual contexts to examine how multilingual speakers converse and manage various aspects of storytelling and how they accomplish a wide range of actions through storytelling in classroom and everyday settings.

An original, book-length endeavor devoted exclusively to storytelling in multilingual contexts, this book contributes to broadening the scope of the foundational conversation analytic literature on storytelling and to further specifying the nature of second language (L2) interactional competence. Designed for pre-service and in-service second or foreign language teachers, students of applied linguistics, as well as scholars interested in storytelling, this volume explores the cross-linguistic nature of generic interactional practices, sheds light on the nature of translanguaging and learner language, and provides insights into teacher practices on managing classroom storytelling.

PART I
Overview

1
MULTILINGUAL STORYTELLING AND CONVERSATION ANALYSIS

Hansun Zhang Waring

Introduction

We live in a world where multilingual speakers are now the norm and no longer – and perhaps have never been – an exception (e.g., Akbar, 2013, Cook, 1992; Grosjean, 2010), and efforts within applied linguistics to problematize the monolingual bias – which treats monolingualism as the default that features the native speaker ideal – have been epitomized in a series of successive arguments for the social turn (Block, 2003), the bilingual turn (Ortega, 2010), and the multilingual turn (May, 2013). Cook (1991), for example, considers multicompetence – “the compound state of a mind with two grammars” – as “the norm for the human race” (p. 103). As such, Cenoz and Gorter (2011) argue that adopting a multilingual approach would afford the possibility of examining language practices in context and gaining greater insights into how languages are acquired and used. Ortega (2013), in particular, advocates for adopting usage-based linguistics (UBL) as a way to move the field “away from explaining why bilinguals are not native speakers (i.e., monolinguals) and towards understanding the psycholinguistic mechanisms and consequences of becoming bi/multilingual later in life” (p. 46). Various concepts and theoretical frameworks such as “translanguaging” (Li, 2018) and “translingual practice,” where “people shuttle in and out of languages to borrow resources from different communities to communicate meaningfully at the contact zone through strategic communicative practices” (Canagarajah, 2013, p. 79), have also been proposed to adequately account for the multilingual reality.

Conversation analysts within the field of applied linguistics have likewise expressed dissatisfaction with the monolingual bias – by problematizing the treatment of the language learner as the defective communicator and the only relevant identity in applied linguistics research (Firth & Wagner, 1997). Second language (L2) users, as have been shown, demonstrate great sophistication and versatility in managing various interactional contingencies, and L2 conversations exhibit a display of achievements rather than deficiencies (Gardner & Wagner, 2004). Rather than using a monolingual standard to gauge L2 competence, for example, Lee and Hellermann (2014) argue for “a close analytic account of how L2 speakers come to terms with contingent constraints and contextual resources in order to carry out their interactional tasks” despite the presence or absence of a story preface (e.g., You want to hear what happened today?) in managing their telling (p. 774). In working with multilingual data, the authors advocate for an approach that assumes participants’ competence and proceeds to evaluate that competence in a “situated and genre-specific manner” (Hellermann & Lee, 2014, p. 63). In a relatively recent endeavor, Waring and Hellermann (2017) issue an explicit call for conversation analysts to consider ways of problematizing the monolingual standard. In one answer to that call, two audio recordings – one presumably with monolingual speakers and one with multilingual speakers – are compared to demonstrate how remarkably similar resources are deployed across the board to seek assistance, pursue uptake, and signal delicacy, which again calls into question the designation of L2 speakers as deficient language users (Wong & Waring, 2017).

One area in which the monolingual bias may be further problematized is storytelling. Integral to the tapestry of social interaction, storytelling has been the focus of interest for scholars from a diverse array of academic disciplines. While great insights have been gained from inquiries into storytelling in monolingual contexts, we have yet to see any concerted effort to explore storytelling in multilingual interaction. As the first collection of conversation analytic (CA) studies on multilingual storytelling (i.e., storytelling conducted in second/additional languages and in languages other than English), the chapters in this volume investigate how participants with a variety of first language (L1) backgrounds converse in a language that may or may not be their L1, manage various aspects of storytelling, and accomplish myriad interactional tasks through storytelling in a range of everyday and classroom contexts. As such, the volume bolsters the argument against the monolingual bias on the one hand and pushes CA work on storytelling beyond its monolingual focus on the other. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I trace Harvey Sacks’ (1992) initial observations on stories and storytelling, offer a synthesis of CA findings on how stories may be launched, told, and responded to, and provide a brief review of the existing literature on multilingual storytelling. I conclude with an overview of the chapters in this volume, highlighting their contributions to advancing our understandings of multilingual storytelling. But first, a brief explication of conversation analysis as a method of analysis that unifies the chapters of this volume is in order.

Conversation Analysis

Founded by sociologists Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, and Gail Jefferson in the 1960s, conversation analysis (CA) is the study of social interaction as it actually happens in its natural habitat. As conversation analysts, we are interested in excavating the tacit methods and procedures participants deploy to get things done in social interaction, be that getting the floor to tell a story, launching a complaint, or exiting a conversation. For the past five decades, CA has been effectively deployed to yield in-depth understandings of social interaction in a wide variety of ordinary conversations and institutional interactions (Sidnell & Stivers, 2013). Informed by Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodology and Goffman’s (1967) theory of interactional order, CA rests on a set of assumptions that prioritize analytic induction (ten Have, 2007) and participant orientations (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973): (1) social interaction is orderly at all points, i.e., no detail can be dismissed a priori; (2) order is constituted by the participants, not conceptualized by the analysts; (3) such order is discoverable and describable through close scrutiny of the details of interaction. These assumptions are materialized in various aspects of CA’s methodology.

The beginning of a CA project, for example, is characterized by “unmotivated looking” (Psathas, 1995, p. 45) rather than driven by a specific research question that might prime us to dismiss certain details a priori. This does not mean that we cannot begin with a broad question such as how multiple demands are managed in the language classroom (Reddington, 2020), where neither the types of demands nor the methods of management are predetermined (or speculated about via hypotheses) but emerge as a result of discovery through detailed, line-by-line, and frame-by-frame inspection of the video-recorded classroom interaction. Analysts work with what Sacks (1984) calls “actual occurrences in their actual sequence” as opposed to “hypotheticalized, proposedly typicalized versions of the world” (p. 25). Analysis begins with transcribing audio/video recordings of naturally occurring interaction using a technical system originally developed by Gail Jefferson (2004) and has become increasingly sophisticated over the years to capture a full range of interactional features such as volume, pitch, pace, intonation, overlap, inbreath, smiley voice, and the length of silence as well as the complexities of multimodality (Hepburn & Bolden, 2017). These minute details of everyday life grant us a close look at the world and see things that “we could not, by imagination, assert were there” (Sacks, 1984, p. 25). With the transcript and its recording, we “make a bunch of observations, and see where they will go” (Sacks, 1984, p. 27). We do so by asking the central CA analytical question “Why that now?” (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), i.e., why a particular bit of talk is produced in that particular format at that particular time: What is it accomplishing? It is in these minute details that evidence is located for how social actions such as requesting or complaining are accomplished by the participants themselves. For conversation analysts, making observations is often done not in isolation but in data sessions with fellow analysts (for data sessions worldwide, see https://rolsi.net/data-sessions/), where we reach for greater accuracy of the transcripts and hold each other accountable for the various analyses we offer.

As our initial observations accumulate, candidate topics of interest can emerge. In some cases, these initial observations become a basis for a “single case analysis” (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 1998), as epitomized in Harvey Sack’s (1992) work that constitutes the beginning of many CA discoveries to come. Also in single case analyses, “the resources of past work on a range of phenomena and organizational domains in talk-in-interaction are brought to bear on the analytic explication of a single fragment of talk” (Schegloff, 1987, p. 101). Many CA studies, however, are collection-based, where our initial observations of single instances provide us a basis for pursuing a candidate phenomenon of interest (i.e., discovering a new practice). We start by building a collection (Sidnell, 2013) of instances to describe that “single phenomenon or single domain of phenomenon” (Schegloff, 1987, p. 101), using a “search criterion” (Bolden, 2019, LANSI Guest Lecture) developed from our initial analyses of single instances. Each instance in the collection then is again subject to a line-by-line analysis to unveil how it is indeed an instance of a particular practice. A practice, according to Heritage (2011), is “any feature of the design of a turn in a sequence” that has “a distinctive character,” occupies “specific locations within a turn or sequence,” and makes a distinct contribution to the action the turn implements (p. 212). When encountering cases that do not fit our initial claim about a particular practice, instead of dismissing these “deviant cases” (Schegloff, 1968), we strive to determine, upon closer examination, whether they fit the claim after all, whether our initial claim needs to be revised, or whether they belong to an entirely different phenomenon or domain of phenomena. In presenting and publishing our findings, we carefully curate our collection to identify data segments that can be shown with the greatest clarity while capturing the widest range of variations, including deviant cases when applicable. (For issues of validity, reliability, and generalizability of a CA study, see Waring, 2016.)

Harvey Sacks and Storytelling

CA discussions on stories and storytelling may be traced back to Harvey Sacks’ lectures in the mid-1960s (later published as part of Lectures on Conversation in Sacks, 1992), in which both what counts as a story and what constitutes telling are addressed. In what follows, I outline Sacks’ take on these two aspects.

For Sacks (1992), a story is a possible description of a tellable experience or event with a proper beginning and a proper ending that takes more than one utterance to produce. I will unpack each of these elements in the following paragraphs. First, a story is a possible description, i.e., a description that aligns with common sense – that is “ordinary” (v2, pp. 215–212). Working with the children’s story The baby cried. The mommy picked it up, Sacks (1992) offers a detailed analysis of how the two sentences work as a “recognizably correct description” or “a possible description” and, by extension, a “possible story” (v1, p. 261). To wit, according to the “viewer’s maxim,” if someone sees an activity such as crying being done by a member of a category (i.e., baby) to which the activity is bound, see it that way. In this case then, the maxim allows us to see the baby as reasonably doing the crying, as opposed to, for example, the “male” (p. 259) or the “catholic” (p. 589) and the mom doing the picking up. What also provides for this particular “seeing,” according to Sacks (1992), is a second viewer’s maxim that hinges on the norm of a mother soothing her crying baby; in other words, if a pair of actions such as “crying” and “picking it up” can be related given a particular norm and the doers can be seen as members of the categories related to those actions, see the doers as these members (e.g., baby and mommy) and, more importantly, the second action “pick it up” as “done in conformity with the norm” (i.e., soothing one’s child) (v1, p. 260). Moreover, according to the “maxim for hearers,” if two categories used (i.e., baby and mommy) can be found to belong to the same collection (i.e., family), hear it that way (Sacks, 1992, v1, p. 236). Both the second viewer’s maxim and the hearer’s maxim then explain how we have no trouble understanding “the mommy” as this baby’s mommy.

Second, the two sentences The baby cried. The mommy picked it up form up a story not only because they constitute a possible description but also because they contain, in Sack’s (1992) words, “a proper beginning and a proper end” (v1, p. 265) (i.e., a problem and a solution). Given that children have limited rights to talk, remarks that indicates trouble such as The baby cried constitute “a first item which is generative,” thereby doing the brilliant job of providing them with the right to continue (Sacks, 1992, v1, p. 23...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part I Overview
• Part II Multilingual Storytelling in Ordinary Conversations
• Part III Multilingual Storytelling in the Classroom
• Appendix: Transcription Notations
• Contributor Biographies
• Index